Fifty-seven years later, in the opera based on the Pushkin story (with the libretto by Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modeste), the composer altered the hero’s name minimally, from Ghermann to Gherman, but in his reinterpretation the plot and characters of The Queen of Spades underwent much more serious changes. Some of them are natural because it was a question of creating a grand melodramatic opera from a compressed prose work. But many of the changes were derived from Tchaikovsky’s completely different feelings toward Petersburg. As Asafyev colorfully reports,
The poison of Petersburg nights, the sweet mirage of its ghostly images, the fogs of autumn and the bleak joys of summer, the coziness and acute contradictions of Petersburg life, the meaningless waste of Petersburg sprees and the amorous longing of Petersburg’s romantic rendezvous, delicious meetings and secret promises, cold disdain and indifference of a man of society for superstition and ritual right up to blasphemous laughter about the other-worldly and at the same time the mystical fear of the unknown—all these moods and sensations poisoned Tchaikovsky’s soul. He carried that poison with him always, and his music is imbued with it.76
There was none of that romantic “poison” in Pushkin. For Pushkin, the Petersburg of The Queen of Spades is a place with a glorious past and future and with a delightful and maybe sometimes slightly mysterious present. In this tale he does not even contemplate the possible doom of the city. Pushkin hides his love for Petersburg beneath irony and uses supernatural events as mere props.
In The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin is much more serious and full of pathos; there Petersburg is the symbol of Russia, and Pushkin interprets contradictions to the Petersburg existence as contradictions to the Russian historical path. Still the poet is convinced of the “unshakability” of the imperial capital, though he doubts that the horrible human price paid for that unshakability was justified.
When Tchaikovsky wrote works with an historical or heroic theme, the patriotic idea in them always prevailed; therefore, it is useless to seek psychological depth in them. But in his late works, Petersburg’s ambiance is psychologized in the extreme. Here people do not think about the fate of the state but only about love, life, and death. Death triumphs in The Queen of Spades: the countess dies (as in Pushkin), but the main characters—Gherman and his love, Liza—die too. And their death predicts the fall of Petersburg itself. Once it is perceived, this sense of the city’s doom is impossible to ignore, it so suffuses the music.
Tchaikovsky’s psychological identification with Gherman, rare even for the extremely sensitive composer, is well known. The fateful scene—the appearance of the countess’s ghost, who tells Gherman the secret of the three winning cards—so deeply disturbed Tchaikovsky that he feared the ghost would come to him as well. When writing Gherman’s death scene, the composer wept out loud. In the diary of Tchaikovsky’s manservant, there is a notation naively describing the feverish composition of The Queen of Spades (the opera was written in forty-four days) and Tchaikovsky’s hysterical compassion for his hero: “he cried all that night, his eyes were still red, he was very exhausted…. He felt sorry for poor Gherman.”77
In Pushkin, the confrontation between Ghermann and the ghost of the countess is presented rather ironically and skeptically. For Tchaikovsky this scene presented an opportunity to look into the “other world” and perhaps even to establish some kind of occult contact. Asafyev indicated that in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades the scene with the ghost sounded like a musical incantation, and he insisted that for a religious person to write it that way was blasphemous. Asafyev compared that episode with Dostoyevsky’s famous story “Bobok,” in which the writer tries to guess what the buried but not yet decomposed former residents of Petersburg talk about in a cemetery.
In this case, too, the difference with a work of literature is striking. In The Queen of Spades we do not find a trace of the cynicism inherent in “Bobok,” for Tchaikovsky obviously sensed that the times when the Petersburg theme could be handled in such a way were gone. As far as the composer was concerned, the curtain was coming down. Mourning Gherman at the end of the opera with a lofty and gloomy chorale, Tchaikovsky mourned Petersburg and himself, as he would later do in the Pathétique. It was because Tchaikovsky tied Gherman’s fate to the fate of the Russian capital (and of himself as well) that it became such a psychologically vibrant symbol of the new era of Petersburg’s culture.
